Most of the press around this movie has to do with whether audiences will still warm to Mel Gibson as a leading man. It’s titillating to talk about Mel’s ugly remarks, his public intoxication and boorishness and his fringy religious beliefs. So titillating that it’s almost completely obscured any discussion about whether you should see this film.

The short answer is “not really.” Despite the fact that Mel remains a confident, natural presence on screen this is not much of a movie. You’ve seen the various parts in other movies, some of them even starring Mel himself. You will guess the resolution of every suspense beat before the film hands them over. You will not care enough about the ancillary characters to be appropriately shocked by their murders. The entire film will seem boilerplate to any reasonably observant film fan. We’ve seen the story of the good cop pushed too far so many times that we should probably put a moratorium on that storyline for a while.

If there’s anything interesting in this film, it’s the choice of villain. All cop-on-the-edge dramas give you bad guys so irredeemably evil in the public mind that we don’t mind that the good guy is breaking the law and abandoning any human moral code to punish them. Usually, these are Nazis, terrorists, and serial killers. In this movie, the bad guy is a corporation. If the film makes any significant contribution to the public dialogue it’s this addition of a Blackwater/Halliburton stand-in to the roster of villains it’s ok to unreservedly hate onscreen. Whether you think that’s appropriate will probably be decided by your politics.

The nicest thing I can say about the film is that it’s competent. You get what you expect from this kind of movie for the most part, and you get a little twist at the end for good measure. But unless you’re kind of hard up for entertainment, you don’t need to see this any time soon.